


A Thousand Times Again

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [18]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Awkwardness, Earth-3, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hiding in Plain Sight, Mirror Universe, Secret Identity, Team as Family, good parents, i feel sorry for the word nefarious nobody uses it seriously anymore, it takes a village, or rather what to do when you haven't got one, parenting is hard, social banditry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 17:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8541682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: A brief history of Ella Quinzel, age five, and the arrangements made to prevent her falling victim to the nefarious Owlman.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Well I'm nowhere near over the emotional devastation a lot of us suffered this week, but I've received two messages now telling me that dark times make fic more valuable to the reading community and it's been true for me, so I'm resolved to keep up my posting schedule. I certainly don't want to abandon J&co! Have some story and characters. ^^

Parenting, J had learned, was _hard_. It would have been much, much harder alone—especially with more than one kid—like, if Harley got turned into a four-year-old all of a sudden, or something—but still. Harder than he'd been expecting.

He'd always liked kids. They were so straightforward about so much, and he'd been rescuing kites and getting recruited to play Godzilla since his first month in Gotham.

The girls had shaken their heads and said he was practically a kid himself back then, and he wasn't sure he'd ever really grown out of it, but this, this dad thing, was different from even the swooping feeling of diving to catch little Mercedes Alvarez when she slipped off the top of the equestrian statue in Finger Park, that moment when the difference between child and adult had clicked abruptly together in his head and he'd realized that simply by virtue of being _around_ them, he was responsible for keeping all these smaller people safe.

Responsible. But if 'responsible' was the difference between adult and child, then he knew some four-foot-tall grown-ups who'd been carrying more than anyone's fair share of their family's weight practically since they could _walk_.

(Even though her family hadn't been especially short of money, he was pretty sure Harley had been one of those kids, too, and that was one of the reasons he loved to make her laugh and see her do frivolous, pointless things just for the joy of them.)

Parenting wasn't easy, but he wouldn't have traded it for anything.

It was hard to say whose idea it was, to pretend their little girl didn't exist.

Ed's, probably, or Harvey's; they were the ones who insisted that Harley go into hiding before her pregnancy started to show. (In retrospect that was the moment when Jokester started thinking of Harvey as _family_ , when the other scarred vigilante had leaned forward in with that naked, visceral concern and _insisted_ ; Ed had already slipped in before that, probably sometime between the time he called J to bail him out of jail in Canada and the first time he spent a weekend crawling around one of Jokester's secret bases muttering to himself and doing mysterious things with wires.)

Afterward, it was just…understood. People threw out ideas about how they could make the secret work without anyone ever openly discussing the question of whether they _should_.

She'd been an accident, of course. Even J wasn't irresponsible enough to _plan_ to add somebody that defenseless to the family under these conditions. But their circumstances weren't so bad that she'd be better off never being born, so they'd gone ahead with her. They loved her, had wanted her as soon as they knew she might exist, and they'd be able to feed her, and that was enough, wasn't it?

It had to be, Harley said, to J but to herself really, because they each had their own fits of self-doubt and ' _is this a selfish choice?'_ had always, always been hers. (Nobody before J had ever told her _yes, a little bit, but that's_ _ **okay**_ _because you matter, too_ ; no one before her had ever told him that his face wasn't something he had to make up for, wasn't just not his fault but _wasn't even a little bit a problem_.)

So they had her. And they hid her.

It was pretty easy at first—Leslie and Jules handled the birth, with the benefit of Edna's constant unsolicited advice, and they had enough babysitters available to never _need_ to take her out with them anywhere, but then Harley started to worry about the mental effects of being kept indoors all the time, about six months in. Smuggling her into Pam's fortified zone in Robinson Park went pretty smoothly, and Ella made an enthusiastic first acquaintance with grass by ripping some up and trying to eat it with her little pink gums.

Of course Harley quickly moved on to worrying about the consequences of being raised in isolation.

The solution to that wasn't too hard, either. Babies all looked alike, at least on cursory inspection. Color variations aside. And nobody ever recognized Harley in a wig. She was just another mother with a stroller, in wide-framed glasses and a bulky sweater that made her look her actual age and then some. (Not one of Edna's. They'd picked it up at a flea market.)

Some of the other parents that frequented her favorite strollering places, especially once Ella was secure enough at toddling to turn her loose on one of the tamer park play structures, learned to recognize the two of them as recreation-neighbors, but Harley suppressed her social tendencies and pretended to be using the time to catch up on her reading. (Not that she ever got much reading done, with Ella out in plain sight and out of arm's reach, but _fear is the mind-killer_ and all that. Precautions were good; much as she loved her husband they'd all be dead if he was allowed to dictate security standards, but senseless terror was the enemy's friend.)

And then Ella was getting to be a bit less _toddler_ and more _little girl_ , and one day Harley went to drag her away from her playmates and heard her telling her friend Jamie about her Unca Way'on, who was a gajillion feet tall and green, and could throw actual cars, and and _and_. (Who, adding up the results of childish hyperbole, was apparently Godzilla. Harley didn't blame Jamie for not believing a word.) She'd managed to hold herself back from raising suspicion by yanking Ella away and hissing at her to shush, but she _had_ had a quiet panic attack and rushed her almost-four-year-old home with all nondescript alacrity.

That was when they realized that, in all their efforts to conceal her, they had never thought to teach her to _lie._

Harley hated to do it, when Ella had gotten used to seeing her friends every week, but they never went back to that park. Who knew how much identifying information the other kids had by now. If they passed it on to adults, who put it together…it was one thing to trust to the kindness of strangers, face-to-face. Another entirely when the strangers could be anyone at all.

So now they had a problem to solve, because keeping Ella indoors or tied to her metaphorical apron strings for eternity was not an acceptable plan.

J, for his part, wanted her to be part of the community, the way the rest of them were. Well, him more than anyone, followed by Waylon and Harley, and then Harvey and Jon, because of their day jobs. Ed usually didn't enjoy himself even if you dragged him out of his computer nest to be social, and Pam was one of nature's lurkers. (Although her local reputation kept climbing steadily because she might not be sociable but she did tend to _organize._ ) But the point was, Ella deserved to be part of that. (J _needed_ her to know the city like he did, even if in a less brass-knuckles-to-the-face, I-have-recovered-from-unconsciousness-on-every-street-south-of-Brixton way. Harley didn't share that need, but she grasped it. It wasn't unlike her own need to make sure their little girl got a solid education.)

But he couldn't just introduce her as his daughter. He'd accepted that, back when everyone convinced him not to show off the little red bundle of baby to all his friends, because of his enemies. Being too closely associated with him was _dangerous,_ and El couldn't take care of herself yet, or make informed decisions about how much danger she was willing to handle.

So obviously she needed a fake family. Not to go live with, or anything, but somebody local who could claim her as a cousin or niece, come to visit from somewhere else for the occasion of an outing.

The trouble was, of all his oldest friends, all the people he trusted best who weren't now recognizably part of his merry gang of lunatics, almost none of them could believably pose as Ella's relatives because none of them were _visually plausible genetic matches_. Ella was a slight, pale little thing, with hazel-blue eyes and a poof of muddy-blonde hair. Alonzo's whole family were stocky and dark even as folks up from Mexico went, and anyway he only had the one sister; Edna was, in addition to being ninety-five and having outlived almost everyone she knew, black, and Catalina was puertorriqueña. Lei Bao was utterly Chinese.

Maria might just have been plausible as a cousin, maybe, but everyone who knew her knew she was alone in the world. Ted was off teaching at Metropolis University these days, and most of the white East Siders J might have been willing to trust with Ella's life had left town, or at least moved uptown, over the years, and those who were left…when it came down to it, it didn't seem fair to ask them to take the risk. They were risking enough. And they wouldn't sell him out, but he would hardly expect them to hold up under interrogation. Would never forgive himself for putting them in that position, now he stopped to think about it.

It didn't _have_ to be a cousin. It could just be the daughter of an old friend, or an adoptee, or all kinds of things. But the more explanations a lie took, the more chances it had to fall apart.

Only about two dozen people even knew Ella existed, and this was the first time J had ever kept a secret—a real, pervasive secret, not just somebody else's private business that he wasn't bringing up—and he didn't like the wall he could feel it putting up between him and everyone-he-wasn't-telling. It had been bad enough, the way he'd had to start letting fewer and fewer people know where he lived at any given time, to make it harder to ambush him in his sleep.

If Owlman had never existed, J probably would never have met Harley. And Ella wouldn't have been born. So he never wished anymore that he was still switching between Red Hood and freelance musician, with so much less drama and so much less danger. But if he could have had his family _without_ the bad guy….

After brainstorming a bit, he asked Roman, who he still trusted even if they didn't see each other so much these days. That wasn't _his_ doing, after all, and there were Sionis relatives all up and down the Eastern seaboard, so a sudden niece would surprise no one. His old friend had tapped a finger on the mask that lay under his hand, frowned, and shaken his head.

"I've got my own enemies these days," he said. "Not as bad as yours, mostly, or at least not so interested, but the Owl could figure out the mask is hiding me any time, and even if he doesn't I'm not about to risk tying your kid's life to whether I've pissed off any absolute bastards."

J nodded, slowly.

Jokester had what might best be called _mixed feelings_ about Roman's career. Because it was important, that somebody play against the Owl at his own game, that the people caught up in the dark economy had somewhere to turn besides the choking embrace of the jackbooted featherheads— _competition_. Old-school capitalism in action, heigh-ho. By its very nature, it held Owlman back and kept a little more freedom in the air, and that was one of the reasons J had always supported Cobblepot, even at times when in the short term it would probably have been better to stay out of things. It was _important_.

But it was still _Owlman's game_ , or one of them, and no matter how much avuncular patronage and honorable-but-illegal business was involved, when you came down to it organized crime was a dirty kind of work, that would ask things of you that stole pieces of your soul maybe even faster than corporate law or policing, because you had so much less to hide behind, so much less chance to tell yourself you'd done nothing really wrong, or get some distance from the consequences. And Roman…he'd never wanted this.

J wished with all his heart he'd had the knowledge and connections to get Roman out of Gotham ten years ago, that he'd been able to figure out a way to send him to college or, or _something_ that would allow him to find a better life, to do something with his mind. To get out of the trap that the city was for so many kids. (He'd done as much for other kids, since, but back then he'd been just a crazy man in a mask, with a guitar and nothing more waiting for him at home.)

If Roman had kept trying, maybe. If he'd believed in his own chances. But he hadn't.

After those three years in juvie, Roman had never really been able to think of himself as an honest citizen again. A juvenile record might be sealed when you came of age, but it still _existed,_ and colleges required you to report any felonies you'd been convicted of, ever, as part of the application process. And that maybe didn't totally _wreck_ your chances, but it definitely didn't _help_ , and neither did the level of education they gave the kids in child jail. A kid could go in falsely convicted (like Roman, lying through his teeth that it had been him who stole the car because Piotr's grandmother would honest-to-god die without him) and come out with the skills he needed for a life of crime, and…not much else.

Prison was basically the stupidest idea in history, in J's opinion, but Harvey had informed him rather irritably that the penal system it had replaced had been based around torture and weekly hangings, so. People were _trying_ to improve, it was just. Hard.

And _hard_ meant that that scornful, bitter look, that bleakness that the nineteen-year-old had worn so openly, had sunk deep into the crevices of the man's character and fused there, part of him. It meant that even as he did his best to fight the good fight, Roman only ever saw himself as someone who'd traded away all his choices at twelve, and was just making the best of it, now.

 _Hard_ meant that Roman had been avoiding him, more and more, for the last few years, and that Jokester had to _ask_ him to take his mask off, these days, when they did meet.

J could tell, when he looked into his old friend's eyes, that he'd killed people. More than one. Not a whole lot, or anything, but the _fact_ of it had that ground-in look, not fixed on any single _person_ but more pointed toward the _act_ , at having come to terms with the fact that taking life was something you could do, and had done, and would do again, if you had to. And really, when it came to something like that, even _one_ was a lot. So.

He was sure it hadn't been murder. Not the really bad kind, at least, the plotted-cold or the spite-hot. It had been in a fair fight, maybe, or to protect someone he had to protect, or even half-an-accident, or all of those at different times, or at the same time, even. _Maybe_ even revenge, and if not yet then probably someday. Roman had killed people for reasons he thought were worth it.

And it didn't make him _bad._ J wasn't really in the business of telling other people how to carry their own wrongs, anyway. But it had changed him. That and the rest of living. He wasn't the kid J had known fifteen years ago, even if the droop of his mouth and the sharp slant of his eyebrows and the weary strength in the way he held his shoulders was the same.

J reached across the table, now, and gripped Roman's forearm. "Thanks," he said.

The rising star of the underworld snorted. "I said no, dumbass."

"And you said it for good reasons. So thanks."

Roman snorted again, in a puff of smoke this time because he'd taken a drag on his cigarette. "How the hell are you _still_ this soft?"

Jokester laughed. "Just stubborn, I guess."

"Yeah," Black Mask allowed, glancing down at his other face waiting to be slipped back on. "Stubborn, for sure."

In the end, they just let her out into the street to play. She obviously had someone looking after her—a hand or a vine catching her arm and dragging a brush through her hair on her way out the door, bathtime every other day _at least,_ clothes rarely new unless Edna made them for her but generally neat—and they'd coached her in being vague about her family. Kids didn't generally care that much about the details of other people's lives, and you didn't have to know exactly where somebody lived or what their last name was to play kickball.

They'd coached her in lying, and how to get away if somebody grabbed you, and never to go more than a few blocks from home without talking to one of them first. On how if Jokester was spotted hanging around and got dragged into a game she had to pretend he wasn't her daddy.

Harley chewed all the nails on both hands back so far it hurt to pick anything up, the first time they let her out alone. But they couldn't raise her in a cage.

Babies were _easy_. All you had to do was feed them and love them, even when they woke you up in the middle of the night over and over and over. So straightforward. They were like terribly fragile, wonderfully amazing, incredibly needy pets. Children were actual _people_ , and parenting was _hard._

By the time she was ready to start school, (kindergarten being excepted as nonmandatory) they had Basil, who between his own extranormal abilities and his more everyday disguise skills allowed their shuffle of paperwork and falsification to pass unremarked.

Eventually, they got access to little portable holograms, which were less reliable than concrete disguises but could change so much more and took so much less effort. They used them as rarely as possible—if Owlman figured out they had such a resource they would stop being able to rely on his confidence that J and Waylon and Harvey were invariably either absent or noticeable, which would be a shame.

(The things did allow Jokester to come to every single one of Ella's school plays.)


End file.
